Have Republicans, and Republicans under President Reagan in
particular, reduced government?
"Here I am afraid the problem is murkier. Prof. Friedman offers a
graph showing the number of pages added to the Federal Register each
year, which is in general a measure of how much economic regulation
people face. It shows that the number of pages added during the
Reagan years declined from its highs under President Carter, and
after five years had actually fallen to roughly the same number of
pages as were added under the previous Republican president, before
starting to rise for the last three years of Reagan's tenure."This doesn't seem very convincing to me for two reasons.
"First, I question whether the number of pages added to the Federal
Register is an accurate gauge of how much individual liberty suffers.
The other problem is the relative value of different freedoms. If you
are a gay American, the fact that in…"When I wrote that "individual liberty suffered" under Reagan, I was
thinking of things like his escalation of the War on Drugs, which
resulted in the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of casual
marijuana users and the enactment at his administration's instigation
of omnibus anti-crime measures that allow, for example, federal
officials to search your person (including, as I recall, your body
cavities) if you happen to be canoeing on a river in central Kansas.
(The law authorized customs officials to make such searches on any
body of water that connected to any body of water . . . that
connected to international waters, which means virtually any lake,
river, or stream outside the basin areas of the West.)"Under Reagan, federal spending as a percentage of GDP fell slightly.
It has increased under Bush. This is not purely attributable to
post-9/11 defense and homeland-security needs; spending outside these
areas rose from 12.8 percent of the economy in 2001 to 14.5 percent
in 2005. Setting aside the question of whether all homeland-security
spending actually goes toward securing the homeland, even excluding
such expenditures non-defense discretionary spending is up nearly 30
percent.
